Hi,
I disagree about AES: the algorithm is actually very transparent and straightforward. It wasn't designed by the NSA either, nor altered to introduce any weakness.
Also, for a one-time pad you can't send someone the key file encrypted using PGP. If you did that it would no longer be a one-time pad, or to be more specific it would no longer satisfy perfect secrecy. It would instead be a theoretically breakable cipher with the same weakness as PGP. For a one-time pad you must transfer the pad material over a channel guaranteed to be secure, no extra encryption allowed.
If I needed a pencil-and-paper cipher I probably wouldn't use a one-time pad, because while the algorithm is super-simple, the key management is horribly complicated, and the one-time pad provides terrible security if anyone is slightly bad at key discipline. It's an example of a cipher that goes from perfect to awful with just a tiny addition of reality.
I disagree about AES: the algorithm is actually very transparent and straightforward. It wasn't designed by the NSA either, nor altered to introduce any weakness.
Also, for a one-time pad you can't send someone the key file encrypted using PGP. If you did that it would no longer be a one-time pad, or to be more specific it would no longer satisfy perfect secrecy. It would instead be a theoretically breakable cipher with the same weakness as PGP. For a one-time pad you must transfer the pad material over a channel guaranteed to be secure, no extra encryption allowed.
If I needed a pencil-and-paper cipher I probably wouldn't use a one-time pad, because while the algorithm is super-simple, the key management is horribly complicated, and the one-time pad provides terrible security if anyone is slightly bad at key discipline. It's an example of a cipher that goes from perfect to awful with just a tiny addition of reality.